WHEN IT COMES TO CRONY CAPITALISM, THEY ARE THE BONNY AND CLYDE OF RIPPPING OFF THE TAX PAYERS FROM DEALS FEINSTEIN AND BOXER PUSH THROUGHT THE CORRUPT HOUSE OF WHORES, THE U.S. SENATE!
FEINSTEIN IS A MAJOR DONOR TO BARACK OBAMA!
Feinstein’s pimp, RICHARD C BLUM
(google that criminal) pays out campaign bribes to CLINTON, KERRY, KENNEDY,
BOXER and of course the other BUSH WAR HAWK, JOE LIEBERMAN!March 1, 2003 The
Democrats' Daddy Warbucks Feinstein family war profits, part II Sen. Dianne
Feinstein's husband, Richard Blum, could well be called the Democrats' Daddy
Warbucks. He's scored bundles from war contracts. He has recently purchased a
$16.5 million crib in San Francisco and along with his wife has handed hundreds
of thousands of dollars over to fellow Democrats. Since the 2000 election
cycle, Blum has contributed over $75,000 to the Democratic Senatorial
Committee, and thousands more to individual Democrats, including John Kerry,
Robert Byrd, Joe Lieberman, Ted Kennedy, and Barbara Boxer. Richard Blum's history
as an entrepreneur began at the ripe age of 23 when he began to work for the
San Francisco brokerage firm Sutro & Company. Blum quickly climbed the
ranks and became a partner by the age of 30. According the San Francisco
Chronicle, "Blum proved that he had an eye for fixer-upper properties when
he led a partnership that acquired the struggling Ringling Bros. and Barnum
& Bailey Circus for $8 million – then sold it to Mattel Inc. four years
later for $40 million." In 1975, Blum went out on his own and formed a
brokerage agency. Today, Blum's lofty firm, Blum Capital, holds positions in
more than 20 companies, including real estate giants, credit bureaus, and yes,
even military contractors. Blum sees himself as an altruistic capitalist,
claims one of his ex-employees: "He likes to go after companies that are
down and out, and bring their stock back to life. He thinks he's doing
good." Blum shares a large stake in Perini, a civil construction company
that is happily employed in Iraq and Afghanistan. But not all of Blum's war
profits come from Perini. In 1975, his venture capital firm went after fledging
construction and design company URS when the business was about to be bought
out by another corporation. Since then, Blum has increased his stock in URS, capitalizing
on its recent military contracts. Unlike Blum's dabbling with Barnum &
Bailey, his current profits aren't so safe for child consumption. Here are the
basics to date: Blum currently holds over 111,000 shares of stock in URS
Corporation, which is now one of the top defense contractors in the United
States. Blum is an acting director of URS, which bought EG&G, a leading
provider of technical services and management to the U.S. military, from The
Carlyle Group in 2002. Carlyle's trusty advisers, past and present, include
former President George H.W. Bush, James Baker, and ex-SEC Commissioner Arthur
Levitt, among other prominent neoconservatives and Washington power brokers.
URS and Blum have since banked on the Iraq war, scoring a phat $600 million contract
through EG&G. As a result, URS has seen its stock price more than triple
since the war began in March 2003. Blum has cashed in over $2 million on this
venture alone and another $100 million for his investment firm. "As part
of EG&G's sale price," reports the San Francisco Chronicle,
"Carlyle acquired a 21.74 percent stake in URS – second only to the 23.7
percent of shares controlled by Blum Capital." The Carlyle Group has long
been accused of exploiting its political connections to turn a profit. And if
Carlyle can come under the microscope for its government ties and war
profiteering, as it did in Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, than surely Blum's
URS ought to be subject to the same scrutiny. Owen Blicksilver, Blum's
spokesman, claims his boss and Sen. Feinstein have never talked shop at home in
their gated mansion: "Mr. Blum and Sen. Feinstein have never had any
discussions about outsourcing, government contracts, or URS." If this were
a Republican senator's spouse scoring bundles off the spoils of war and passing
it along to fellow Republicans, the liberals would be up in arms. But since
Dianne Feinstein is a leading Democrat, mum's the word. Partisanship trumps
ethics. The Byrne Report Hawk Tale By Peter Byrne ON JAN. 18, California
senator Dianne Feinstein introduced Dr. Condoleezza Rice at a Senate nomination
hearing for Secretary of State in terms so saccharine that molasses seemed to
ooze out of her mouth. She was a precocious child, Feinstein purred. She has
skill, judgment and poise. She loves football. Bush loves her. "The
problems we face abroad are complex and sizable. If Dr. Rice's past performance
is any indication, though, we can rest easy." That very same day,
Feinstein's husband, Richard Blum, took advantage of a spike in the price of his
URS Corporation stock. He sold a third of his holdings in the defense
contractor for $57 million, according to filings with the U.S. Securities and
Exchange Commission. With Rice confirmed, the business of death and occupation
looks rosy as hell for Feinstein, who--let's get real--benefits tremendously
from sharing community property with Blum. URS' largest customer is the U.S.
Army, which accounted for 17 percent ($587 million) of its cash revenue in
2004. In 2001, URS enjoyed a mere $169 million in defense contracts. Now, its
war contracts total more than $2 billion. According to its annual report, the
San FranciscoĆbased URS anticipates that profits will rocket up in 2005,
because "operations in the Middle East are expected to generate increased
work related to the development of weapons systems, the training of military
pilots and the maintenance, upgrade and repair of military vehicles."
Provided, of course, that our hawkish leadership remains as poised and lovable
as the new Secretary of State. Feinstein, who sits on the Defense
Appropriations Subcommittee, is an advocate of first-strike warfare, even
though it flouts international law and the standards of common decency.
Interestingly, her Financial Disclosure Report for 2003 was more than three times
the size of her 2002 disclosure (Feinstein's 2003 disclosure numbers 133 pages,
compared to Sen. Barbara Boxer's six-page report). The Feinstein-Blum portfolio
is crammed with multimillion dollar investments in the
military-industrial-financial complex and corporations that heavily exploit
Third World peoples. The senator has a lot to lose should the neoconservative
war machine falter. Hubby holds a controlling interest in another engineering
firm, Perini Corporation of Framingham, Mass. Perini ranks No. 6 by dollar
amount in war-related government contracts in the Middle East. According to its
annual report, "Perini proudly supports the U.S. government with global
rapid response capabilities for defense, reconstruction and security."
Perini builds military facilities and roads in Afghanistan, electrical
infrastructure in Iraq and U.S. embassies around the world. After the Senate,
Feinstein included, approved Bush's war plans in 2002, Perini's defense
contract awards soared from negligible to $2.52 billion. But, as with many of
the sole-source, open-ended contracts awarded to politically connected firms,
there are problems with accountability. Last summer, Department of Defense
auditors determined that Perini could not adequately justify its costs in Iraq as
fair and reasonable. That's government-speak for: They're gouging the #!$% out
of us. Perini is heavily engaged in military and municipal public works
projects inside the United States; at least two are also under investigation
for contract fraud. For example, the city of San Francisco has sued general
contractor Perini--which was in a joint venture with the Tutor-Saliba
construction firm--for $100 million in cost overruns at a San Francisco
International Airport project. The lawsuit alleges that the joint venture
engaged in "a sophisticated pattern of fraud," including inflating
costs, fabricating delays and setting up minority front companies to exploit
affirmative-action preferences. The attorney general of Massachusetts is
looking into alleged false claims made by a Perini joint venture in the
"Big Dig" urban highway construction boondoggle in Boston. Ron Tutor,
owner of Tutor-Saliba and CEO of Perini, bought into the latter company, along
with Blum, as it teetered on the edge of solvency in the mid- 1990s due to a
bad real estate investment. It rebounded, thanks to the firm's sudden ability
to obtain lucrative U.S. military and government contracts, which, of course,
had nothing to do with the fact that Blum's powerful wife has her hands on the
military's purse strings. Remarkably, Perini grossed $1.37 billion in 2003, up
27 percent from the previous year, before the U.S. invasion and occupation of
Iraq. Perini attributes its rocketing profits to "increased volume of work
in Iraq and Afghanistan." As a risk factor, the firm notes that continued
demand for its military services depends upon "the political situation in
Iraq," which, logically, means that it desires the bloody war and useless
occupation to continue indefinitely--a wish that hawktails with the foreign
policy positions of Bush, Rice, Rumsfeld and Feinstein. I almost forgot: Perini
Corp. is the nation's most active builder of Indian-fronted casinos. That
explains a few things about Sen. Feinstein and the politics of gambling, soon
to be revealed in greater detail in this space.
(Note the financing of the war
profits machine, in bed with the BUSH FAMILY WAR PROFITS MACHINE OF CARLYLE
GROUP, is by Wells Fargo. Feinstein has long been in bed with big bankers.
Wells has given her piles of campaign bribes over the years. She in turns
pushes their OPEN BORDERS plan for millions of illegals. Wells and Bank of
America are major La Raza donors. Feinstein was also the push behind the
Banker’s Bankruptcy bill. What you will not find Feinstein ever doing is
standing up to BANKING CRIMES, including illegally opening the bank accounts of
illegals, or Mexican drug dealers. But then Feinstein never does anything that
doesn’t put a dollar in her vast pocket.)
URS to acquire Washington
Group for $2.6 billion
By MarketWatch
Last Update: 6:48 PM ET May
28, 2007
SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch)
-- URS Corp., an engineering company, will acquire Washington Group
International Inc. in a cash and stock transaction valued at about $2.6
billion, the companies said Monday.
common stock for each Washington
Group share, the companies said. Based on the closing price of URS stock on
Friday, the deal price is valued at $80 per Washington Group share, and
represents a premium of about 14%. URS stockholders will retain their shares
after the deal closes, and Washington Group stockholders will own approximately
31% of the combined construction and engineering company, to be called URS
Corporation, the companies said. The companies' combined 2006 revenues would
have been $7.6 billion, which would have made it the fourth-highest among
publicly-traded U.S. engineering and construction companies, they said. Based
on their previously issued forecasts, they project combined 2007 revenues of
about $8.6 billion. ------------Wells Fargo -----------and Morgan Stanley are
committed to providing debt financing to URS for the cash portion of the deal,
which is not conditioned on financing and is expected to close in the second
half of 2007. After the transaction, URS is expected to have about $1.5 billion
in dent and a debt-to-capital ratio of about 37%. The deal is subject to
approval of the merger agreement by Washington Group shareholders, the approval
of URS shareholders' approval of issuance of shares for the transaction, as
well as regulatory conditions. Martin M. Koffel will remain CEO of the combined
company, the announcement said.
GOOGLE FEINSTEIN and HUSBAND WHITE
COLLAR CRIMINAL RICHARD BLUM WITH WAR PROFITEERS FENSTEIN’S MANY MANSIONS RED
CHINA MEDICAID PILLAGE LA RAZA DONORS AND MAJOR DI DONORS WELLS FARGO, AND BANK
OF AMERICA PHONEY TAX SUPPORTED COMPUTER SCHOOL..... RICHARD BLUM BUYS BOARD OF
REGENTS FOR $75 TO GRAY DAVIS and gets his dirty hands on REGENTS
contractsWHERE THERE’S A DEAL TO BE HAD IN THE BACK ROOM, THERE’S OUR OLD WHORE
AND HER PIMP
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